Achieving Peace: Forgiveness Leads to Forget…ness

“To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to think about it.” – Confucius

May 13, 2014: the University of St. Andrews in Scotland proves your mother right. The old saw, “forgive and forget,” turns out to be not just an instruction but an ‘if-then’ statement in disguise: if you forgive someone for their wrongs, you’re more likely to forget those wrongs. If you do not forgive someone, those offenses will remain a thorn in your side for a long time.

Researchers gave participants in the study a series of scenarios that involved a variety of wrongdoings like libel, robbery, unfaithfulness, and more. For each scenario, they asked the participants to evaluate the nature and depth of the crime, how sympathetic the transgressor and victim were, and then decide whether or not they would forgive the transgressor. They also paired each scenario with a ‘cue word’ — an unrelated neutral word that was intended only to act as a mnemonic device.

Later, they took the participants and showed them a set of cue words, some written in green and others written in red. If the cue word was in green, they were allowed to take some time to remember and reconstruct the related scenario; if it was red, they were to proceed immediately to the next step. That step was to answer a series of questions about the scenario, essentially reconstructing the answers they initially gave about forgiveness, sympathy, and so on.

The results were shocking: whether given the opportunity to consider or not, the participants remembered significantly more details about each scenario correctly if they didn’t forgive the perpetrator of the offense.  But equally importantly, people who did forgive and then answered after being given time to consider didn’t fare terribly better than people who forgave and then answered immediately — in short, forgiveness directly led to forget-ness, even when the opportunity to perform deliberate recall was given.

The Practical Outcome
The study powerfully suggests that the key to moving past painful memories and moving forward with your life is finding a way to forgive the person who inflicted those painful memories on you in the first place. This insight has extraordinary impact on families, especially those undergoing separation and divorce.

“The ability to forget such upsetting memories may, in turn, provide an effective coping strategy that ultimately enables people to move on with their lives,” the lead author of the study said. “We hope that…new fields of enquiry may…give rise to powerful therapeutic tools that will enable people to ‘forgive and forget’ more effectively. In the meantime, it would seem that while forgiving [is] an effortful process, forgetting may actually become easier as a result.”